Download Charles Taylor: Varieties of Religion Today. William James

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Charles Taylor: Varieties of Religion Today.
William James Revisited
Cambridge – London 2002: Harvard
University Press, 127 pp.
In his well-known essay On the History and
Systematics of Sociological Theory (1967),
Robert K. Merton gave five reasons for why
social scientists keep coming back to the
classics in their fields. One of them was “an
improbable event: a dialog between dead
and living” which, according to Merton, led
not only to better internalisation of the cognised, but also, at the same time, contributed
to formulating new questions based on the
positive interference of ideas between the
two authors. This is exactly what Canadian
philosopher and sociologist of religion
Charles Taylor accomplished when he ‘meditated’ on William James’s more than a century old Varieties of Religious Experience. Rethinking this author’s principal work is all
the more relevant because James is undoubtedly, worldwide and otherwise, one of the
most popular scholars on religion. It is his
phenomenological rather than ‘manipulatively psychological’ grip on religiosity and
especially religious experience that even today makes him a highly modern author, an
author who has been undoubtedly ‘trendy’
since the beginning of the 20th century (cf.
David M. Wulff: Psychology of Religion. New
York 1997: Willey). All the more surprising
then is how rarely James’s work is mentioned
in Czech religionist, philosophical and psychological discourse. Our psychologists of
religion seem to be too preoccupied with
deep psychology theories, de facto reducing
a person to a subject of ontogenetically and
phylogenetically conditioned intra-psychic
processes (cf. most recently Pavel Říčan: Psychologie náboženství. (Psychology of Religion).
Prague 2002: Portál), while phenomenologists and philosophers, traditionally looking
down on psychology for this very reason, are
seemingly unable to get over James’s hastily
assigned label of psychologist, and actually
read him. However, William James preceded
this, today considered unfortunate, particularisation of the humanities and the social
sciences, and it is the inter-disciplinary nature of his interests that makes this work still
relevant. ‘James revisited’ therefore helps us
address some hotly debated issues in philosophy and the sociology of religion.
In the book reviewed here, Charles Taylor
has not attempted the impossible task of summing up James’s view on religion (more recent books on this subject to be recommended include Gay W. Allen: William James. New
York 1967: Viking; Jacques Barzun: A Stroll
with William James. Chicago 1983; D. Capps
and J. L. Jacobs (eds.): The Struggle for Life.
West Lafayette 1995: SSSR; Johannes Linschoten: Auf dem Wege zu einer phänomenologischen Psychologie. Berlin 1961: Gruyter). On
the contrary, in the first chapter (pp. 3–29) he
focuses on some of James’s main points,
while hinting at his limitations with regard to
our (post-)modern reality. At the same time,
he manages to show that while for James individual religious experience, and not institutionally mediated religiosity, was the key, often this individual experience is to a large extent formed by religious groups (pp. 7, 28).
Yet we should not forget that Christianity
(and other religions) guarantees redemption
not only to ‘religious virtuosos’ but to all believers (p. 10). In other words, James’s individualist view of religion, no matter how highly modern it seems, was too narrow; yet it was
he, through this limitation of his, who significantly documented the very existential situation of modern society and its interpretation
of relations between the individual and supraindividual entities. The limits to James’s conceptualisation of (modern) religiosity are also
dealt with in the second chapter, characteristically titled with a key Jamesian term as
‘Twice-Born’ (pp. 33–60). In addition to
‘healthy-minded religion’, or, a happy inner
relationship with God, James also emphasised the other possibility for transcendent
connection – the continual sense of one’s own
inadequacy and sinfulness, resolvable only
through a second, spiritual ‘birth’, the prereq-
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uisite to redemption. It must be pointed out
that James not only heavily favoured this ‘pessimistic’ type of religiosity, but also covertly
cited some of his own experiences in the book
(p. 34). According to Taylor, such religious experiences motivated some other authors, e.g.
Max Weber, or more contemporarily Marcel
Gauchet (p. 41), to study religion. From the
point of view of the sociology of religion, the
fact of great significance is that James’s widely discussed feeling of personal sinfulness
among the followers of these ‘sick-soul religions’ constitutes one of the main streams
that feed the massive spread of Pentecostal
evangelicalism (p. 38), which, according to
P. L. Berger and other authors, represents an
important element of cultural globalisation
(cf. Peter L. Berger, ed.: The Desecularization of
the World. Washington – Grand Rapids 1999:
EPPC + Eerdmans, pp. 37–49), while, for instance, in the African-American environment
having been replaced by Islam (p. 39). In poetic terms, “James is our great philosopher of
the cusp. He tells us more than anyone else
about what it’s like to stand in that open
space and feel the winds pulling you now
here, now there. He describes a crucial site of
modernity” (p. 59). This leads to what M. Eliade later calls ‘fear of history’ or, in other
words, the search for certainties based on religion (overtly or otherwise).
After some detailed explanation, in the
third chapter Taylor gets to the point he
wants to make, which is philosophical and
sociological analysis of contemporary EuroAmerican religiosity (pp. 63–107), summing
up that, although “more and more people are
pushed on to the cusp that James so well described … [it means] they don’t add up the
global vindication of James’s idea of religious
experience that they might be thought to at
first blush” (pp. 63–4). Modern secularisation
not only leads to the formation of more or
less fundamentalist religious denominations
(to what Taylor calls ‘old-Durkheimism’, referring to the classical theory of the social
role of religious groups) or limits itself to
transferring religiosity of a certain type to the
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ethnic, class or state entities (M. Juergensmeyer’s ‘ethnic religions’ or R. N. Bellah’s
‘civil religion’) that he calls ‘neo-Durkheimian’ (p. 78). Alongside these two types of religiosity the equally important ‘post-Durkheimian’ modus appears, based on ‘expressive’ individualism, which in turn has its origins in consumption and its transformations
after the Second World War (p. 80). While in
a traditional society, where belonging to a religious group and to society as a whole was
the same, a person was born into the church
(although there were also marginalised
heretic groups and tolerated outsiders), and
in the modern social structure people either
chose their denomination and/or participated in a religiously or implicitly religiously anchored political entity, in our (post)modern
world none of this necessarily applies. “The
religious life or practice that I become part of
not only must be choice, but must speak to
me; it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this” (p. 94)
or, in other words, it does not have to be connected with any social group. According to
Taylor, contemporary religiosity cannot be
fully described in Durkheimian terms any
more, because “the spiritual as such is no
longer intrinsically related to society” (p. 102).
On the one hand, this privatisation of religion leads to a massive spread of atheism and
at the same time to more and more frequent
shifts to non-Christian, mainly Oriental religious traditions; on the other hand, it stirs up
reaction in the form of fundamental transformations of established churches trying to
address this situation, like the Second Vatican Council, representing Catholics, or, for
Protestants, a number of Charismatic movements (p. 107).
Taylor’s description of the plurality and
gradual privatisation of modern Euro-American religiosity (the author correctly realises it
is not a global trend, p. 97), and of its fundamental interconnection with the economic
and consumer sphere, in many aspects naturally corresponds with the earlier ideas of P. L.
Berger and Thomas Luckmann. However, it is
Reviews
in James that Taylor finds basic similarities in
the perception of faith. Therefore, at the end
of the book, Taylor asks to what extent
James’s prediction of modern religiosity was
justified and, together with this psychologist
and philosopher, he tries to go a little deeper
than the scientific discourse of the sociology
of religion ‘allowed’ Berger and Luckmann.
As a philosopher – or, to use the metaphor I
started my review with, as a pair of philosophers in fruitful dialog – he can afford to do
so. And that’s where Taylor’s strength lies.
Taylor concludes his thought saying that
William James was undoubtedly right that religious experience of a certain type is a key
phenomenon of our era, but, together with
the above-mentioned sociologists of religion,
James wrongly believed in its strict individualisation, though it eventually led to the concept of religious de-privatisation (P. L. Berger:
Desecularization, pp. 1–18; José Casanova: Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago –
London 1994: University of Chicago Press,
pp. 211–34). “In a post-Durkheimian world,
this allegiance [= piety] will be unhooked
from that to a sacralized society (paleo [Durkheimian] style) or some national identity (neo
[Durkheimian] style); but it will still be a collective connection” (p. 112). That is exactly
why there is de-secularisation going on right
now, as many people are finding existential
security through various (more or less) unorthodox religious groups; for this very reason, implicit ‘neo-Durkheimian’ religiosity is
still alive, along with its many abused forms
(Taylor explicitly mentions the war in Yugoslavia and the BJP in India, p. 115). Finally,
it is the very attempt to retain this highly religious experience that leads each one of us, regardless of any ‘personal’ faith, to religious institutions that enable this (pp. 111–116). According to Taylor, (post)modern religiosity
arises in a ‘post-Durkheimian’, typically Jamesian experience of faith, yet it soon strives to
become formally institutionalised, although it
is nowhere stated whether and to what extent
this institutionalisation must conform to established religious tradition. ‘Jesus in Disney-
land’ (David Lyon) is one of the many forms
of modern faith that are clearly neither completely Christian nor completely inconsistent
with Christianity.
In a way, this exquisitely written book,
which this review is meant to draw attention
to, does not really bring us anything new:
many of the important considerations of
modern religiosity that Taylor came up with
through his ‘dialogue’ with William James
are well-known from the works of modern
sociologists of religion. Yet there is another
aspect of Taylor’s book, which makes it a truly brilliant and inspirational analysis – the
book’s methodology. Through his encounters with James, the author showed us that a
pregnant articulation of key social and scientific problems does not necessarily have to
be achieved through strictly scientific analysis but can also be done so using a philosophical speculation of sorts, providing it is
able to maintain its relation to science (in this
case the sociology of religion). This philosophical-scientific co-operation in widely varied fields is a long-term goal of the Institut für
die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna,
where Taylor’s book originated. Pointing out
the possibility of the often very fruitful connection is especially significant in Central
and Eastern Europe. The problem is that the
Marxist ‘scientification’ of the social sciences has so torn this connection and devaluated its results that even today it is not considered natural or even possible. That is not
to say that in the context of the sociology of
religion we should give up the standards of
science or that religious experience alone
will lead us to religious studies; rather it is to
point out the fundamental mutual benefits
of both the scientific and the philosophicaltheological approach to religiosity if both
sides take each other seriously enough and
at the same time are aware of the limits of either approach. Taylor’s book Varieties of Religion Today is a perfect example of the plausibility of such a synthesis.
Zdeněk R. Nešpor
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